The Most Dangerous Woman in America: (Machine Guns, Coal Dust, and the Making of the American Dream)

By
Amy Nicholson, L.A. Weekly
| Posted June 22, 2010, 5:20 p.m.

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Eighty years after her death, Mother Jones' howl for safe mines and responsible corporations still echoes. Therese Diekhans' hell-raising one-woman show captures the lioness shaming a field of miners about needing an 83-year-old woman to fight their fight (in fairness, she lied about her age). Playwright David Christie isn't interested in biography; this is a snapshot of a firebrand and the climate that forged her, and under Carol Roscoe's direction, the actress shifts wonderfully between 15 characters, including a grandstanding John D. Rockefeller Jr., who pontificates to workers that if they can't afford to feed their families, "Your children should not have been born."